


these days when we waken

by aquila (pipistrelle)



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Drift Bond, Drift Side Effects, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Slurs, basically raleigh is a lovesick puppy, events of the movie, i don't know i wrote a thing, mentions of Yancy and Tendo, that's it that's the story, warning for use of G Danger's full name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-30
Updated: 2014-01-30
Packaged: 2018-01-10 14:51:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1160984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/aquila
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Gipsy Danger is taking up too much of him, and what's not Gipsy is Mako. There's no room in his head to care about dying. Maybe there never was."</p>
<p>Or, Raleigh Becket is a lovesick puppy who saves the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these days when we waken

Looking back, it's obvious that he was never going to walk away from Mako Mori unscathed.

She steps out on that helipad already sizing him up, looking him over like he's a twisted, rusted-out hunk of Jaeger scrap that Pentecost had dredged out of the Gulf of Alaska and dumped at her feet (which isn't far from the truth). She looks at him like he's hers,  and not just for administrative purposes. 

He doesn't fall for her right then, not entirely, though her smile when she discovered that he spoke Japanese had stung him -- like a circuitry suit making contact, an electrical jump to every synapse -- and that should have been a warning sign. But if he had ever listened to warning signs, he'd probably still be in Shithole, Alaska with an undamaged brain, a breathing brother and a long life expectancy, so he just smiles back and lets her take his umbrella.

She walks like she's used to people not noticing her -- a step and a half behind Pentecost, quiet and self-assured. Raleigh tries not to notice her, and with the distraction of the entire Shatterdome working for him, he almost succeeds. He manages to keep his head even when she drops the cool competence and drops to the floor to play with Hercules Hansen's dog, which is really too adorable for anyone to bear. But then he's alone with her for all of ten seconds and he can't help it, he has to ask, and he doesn't know what he's expecting her to say about his rockstar jockeying record, but it's not what she says. _I think you are not the right man for this mission._

It's not the criticism that floors him -- he's not so far gone that he needs praise from pretty girls to nourish his deflated has-been's ego. There's no anger or resentment in him at all, just something he doesn't recognize immediately, something familiar that he doesn't have a name for. He goes to bed dizzy with it, dizzy from the time-lag and the thought of being in a Jaeger again, and from Miss Mako Mori.

Twelve hours later she pulls his feet out from under him in the Kwoon with a swing that's just too wild to be subtle, and as he crashes onto his back he thinks, _Yes_. The air goes out of him and she's got her hanbo hooked under his knee, holding his hips off the ground, and he thinks _this is what you do to me_. The look of savage triumph on her face makes him hesitate; he wants to knock her down in retaliation and he's elated that she's happy and he can't decide which impulse to follow.  
  
He settles for rolling to his feet and strutting a little, knowing she'll see the challenge in his smirk: _Do it again_.

* * *

 

It takes him a while to come to grips with the fact that everyone in the Shatterdome is not in love with Mako. It makes no sense to him that people can just walk past without glancing at her, or that she ever has to raise her voice to be heard, even in the crowded LOCCENT. He's more than a little awestruck by this physically unimposing, outwardly quiet and self-contained woman who everyone seems to think is no more than Pentecost's shadow. It doesn't make any goddamn sense.

But Raleigh has never spent too much time worrying about whether what he feels makes any sense; Yancy always used to do that for him. What he knows is that he is the one person in Hong Kong less awed by Pentecost than Pentecost's shadow. He has found his inarguable co-pilot.

* * *

 

That first Drift, he learns what it's like to lose her.

For the first horrible half-minute he thinks he's lost her in the Drift itself. The connection splinters and Mako isn't moving. He stumbles out of his rig and pulls her out of hers, detaching the helmet -- she needs air, he thinks, that's all he can think, until slowly the here-and-now begins to reassert itself and the ashy, acidic taste of Tokyo burning fades from his lungs and his throat.

Raleigh goes down with Mako as her knees buckle. Her head lolls back against his shoulder and her eyes roll, tracking rescue choppers in a nonexistent sky.

There are people who don't come out of the Drift. Raleigh's seen it happen once, in Lima. A Ranger he'd never met got caught by something in his memory or his co-pilot's, and it dragged him under like a riptide. His body came out of that Conn-Pod in one piece, but his mind never came up for air again, and he had died a few days later. His copilot had gone AWOL. No one looked for her.

Raleigh shoves the memory back and tries to focus. Touch helps. It's the first lesson veteran pilots teach rookies; there's no cure for the aftermath of connection, but physical contact takes the edge off. Raleigh tries to rub his hands over Mako's arms, to warm her -- she's cold, he knows that she's cold, through Drift or instinct, he has no idea and doesn't care -- but he's forgotten the circuitry suits, bulky layers of plastic separating skin from skin. The only thing he can think to do is press his cheek to her temple, hoping she can feel his breath ruffling her hair and his heart crashing against his ribs, hoping she hasn't gone so far down the rabbit hole that she can't find her way back.

A hiss of pressure fills Gipsy Danger's head as the external corridor connects, and Raleigh can hear the frantic pounding of boots and fists at the hatch as medics and techs try to wrench open the fried locking mechanisms. It won't take them more than a minute to get in.

"Listen, Mako," he says in her ear, hoping against hope that she can hear him somewhere in Tokyo fifteen years ago, that his voice will be a line she can follow back to the now. "I threw us out of sync first. Don't worry, I'll tell the Marshall. I pulled the ground out from under you, it wasn't your fault you fell."

A heartbeat passes in silence. Then she takes a deep, shuddering breath and pushes his arms away. He lets her go at once, and she leans forward to brace her head in her hands. "Mako," he blurts out, dizzy with dread and relief. When she looks at him over her shoulder she's pale, but her eyes are focused and clear.

The hatch gives with a squeal of metal and suddenly the pod is full of uniforms, people shouting orders and moving purposefully towards the console, the rigs, the pilots. A pair of techs grab Raleigh's arms and haul him to his feet, stripping the circuitry suit off in pieces without touching or looking at him. Mako is undergoing the same treatment a few feet away, but she isn't looking at him, either. All of them -- the techs, the officers, Mako -- all of them have the same blanched, half-queasy looks of terror that they're trying to hide, and through the buzz of fading panic Raleigh remembers that every single one of them, including him, just came a heartbeat away from being vaporized into so much radioactive ash. As the last pieces of the circuitry suits clatter to the floor the techs fall back, making way for medics, who determine that neither pilot is actively in neurogenic shock before hauling them off to face judgement.

Raleigh knows he should be enraged and humiliated and terrified on the forced march to Pentecost's office, and he is, somewhere back in the rational part of his brain. But the rational part of the brain is never in control just after a Drift, least of all a Drift they have to drag you out of by yanking the power cord out of the wall.

With the bulky suits gone and just an inch of insulating air separating him from Mako, the itch to realign the jagged edges where their connection fractured builds to an ache, then an agony. She must be feeling it too, but she doesn't glance at him even once, doesn't reach for his hand or acknowledge his presence at all. In the Conn-Pod she gave the medics one-word answers when they questioned her, quiet and soft; on that walk through harshly lit corridor after corridor Raleigh feels like he might die if he doesn't hear her voice, he thirsts for it like drought-stricken dirt thirsts for rain, but she doesn't say a word, to him or to anyone else.

She's alive, but he's lost her all the same.

Left outside Pentecost's door, he bows his head under the weight of the terrible certainty, the terrible grief. Of course she would want nothing more to do with him; he turned her first Drift, the moment she'd been training and studying for her whole life, into a waking night terror. For her -- for anyone -- his brain is a minefield, his memory riddled with PTSD triggers like shrapnel in a wound. Of course she'll never Drift with him again -- and how could he ask her to?

He tries to push away the moping, straighten his shoulders, think about what he'll do now that Pentecost will ground him or discharge him, but the future slips through his fingers. All he can think about is Mako -- whether she'll get a new copilot, whether he'll watch her Jaeger save the world on a shitty TV in a bar somewhere, Sitka or Hong Kong, wherever. Whether maybe one day when she's a hero she'll want to talk to him again. They definitely had something, and he doesn't think she'll be willing to throw that away forever.

The thought of going back to life without her numbs him, makes it easy to ignore the threats they can hear Chuck Hansen shouting through the door. He's numb enough even to ignore the man himself when Chuck comes storming into the passage. But then Mako steps forward, and maybe he's half in her head still but he sees the way her shoulders tense, see the almost-gesture of her arm blocking Chuck's path to Raleigh. Her body language blasts like a bullhorn in Raleigh's ears: _Mine_.

He hasn't lost her. The idea is absurd, but he doesn't question it, he wouldn't question anything that let him stay with Mako Mori. _Mine_.

He goes too far in telegraphing it back to her, he punches Chuck in the face, but at that point he would have torn apart a kaiju with his bare hands. Chuck doesn't scare him, Pentecost and Herc don't scare him, getting his brain burned out in a catastrophic Drift doesn't scare him, as long as he's drifting with her.

The euphoria fades a little in Pentecost's austere office, facing Pentecost's austere displeasure, which is somehow worse because it's not unkind. The euphoria fades, but not the determination. This is the real thing, whether or not it's sanctioned by the PPDC. Pentecost isn't half the man Raleigh knew five years ago if he can't see that.

If Pentecost had grounded him, Raleigh was prepared to beg to stay on as a common soldier, to watch Mako learn with a new copilot, if she'd have him. But Pentecost grounds her, and he has no idea what to do.

He does what he does best: he waits, and hopes.

* * *

 

Yancy was torn wounded and screaming out of Raleigh's head; Mako fades.

He is so full of grief and agony and _holding on_ that he almost doesn't realize what's happening. There's no violent shock, just her thoughts pulling back from his like the receding tide, leaving dry empty wastes and the sharp rocks of nightmare. He doesn't have to ask what's wrong. He can still feel, at the edges of his own pain, the ache in her starved lungs, the panic giving way to haze and then darkness. A part of him wants to follow her down into oblivion; it would be so easy, to just let himself fall down the black hole in the Drift that she leaves behind.

He chases her -- he chases Yancy -- tries to follow --

No. She hasn't gone beyond following. Not yet.

There is a supercomputer in Raleigh's head. Without Mako to draw half the neural load, he can feel it, the raw information red-hot in his brainstem, more every second. Processes pile up against each other in his cerebral cortex as Gipsy Danger reaches for power, more power, to move her mangled limbs, to shunt heat out of her heart. It burns. Gipsy Danger consumes Raleigh's brain, devours it, blots it out with phoenix fusion bursts of information that no human head can hold alone. And locked away in some lone cluster of synapses, fighting not to be repurposed, runs the conviction that is less than a thought: air she needs air she needs air

Raleigh bobs to the surface of the torrent of data for a heartbeat, two, three, long enough to swap the oxygen lines. He wants to tell Mako that it's okay, it'll be okay, but Mako can't hear him. He talks to her anyway, and all the time the neural load is gathering pressure, cresting like a wave, and his consciousness rests on top of it like a thin film of oil, barely cohesive, about to disperse.

Calculations batter at him. He's larger than she is -- breathing faster -- whatever oxygen she was getting is even less for him. He takes his first breath of near-nothing and knows he's going to die.

Gipsy Danger is taking up too much of him, and what's not Gipsy is Mako. There's no room in his head to care about dying. Maybe there never was.

Gipsy Danger reaches for the subroutines that pump his heart. The Drift is empty. Raleigh knows what happens next.

He burns.

* * *

There are visitors while he's recuperating. To Raleigh, most of them are a blur of morphine fog and gold braid; PPDC brass, he guesses in moments of lucidity. Or ex-PPDC, or whatever the PPDC is going to be in this brave new unbreached world. Mako talks to him about the political situation when he's conscious, though she must know that he doesn't understand a word of it, that when he groans or starts to cry it's a reaction purely to the sound of her voice. She keeps talking while he cries and rests one hand on his forehead, gently stroking her thumb through his hair until he falls back into unconsciousness.

He wakes up fully for the first time on the third evening, weak and thirsty and alone in the little pilots-only infirmary room with its two identical beds and two identical panels of instruments. The empty bed across from him is a thing out of nightmare -- an old nightmare, rising like bile, and for a second he is wild with agony and Yancy's name tears his throat --

"Raleigh!"

It's not Mako who comes running in; it's Tendo, Tendo's blurred face peering down at him with concern and relief over a red checkered bow tie. "Hey, take it easy, Becket boy," Tendo is saying, his hand resting on Raleigh's shoulder, holding him gently but firmly down on the bed. "It's okay. It's over, you did it, you closed the Breach."

"Closed...?" Raleigh's voice sounds like it's been dragged over glass, which is about how his throat feels.

"Yeah. Motherfucking closed. No more Kaiju," Tendo says.

No more Kaiju. He will feel that later; there are more important things first. "Mako?"

"She went to get some coffee. Figures, the first five-second break she takes from watching your chewed-up carcass, and that's when you decide to wake up." Tendo's grinning so wide Raleigh's afraid his face might split. "You always did have the best sense of timing."

"Shut up," Raleigh groans, but he can't help smiling back.

Mako comes in just then and she is beautiful, beautiful. She is ragged and careworn in a dark blue engineer's jumpsuit, she is visibly exhausted with shadows under her eyes and no color in her face, she is full of joy and relief and clutching a Styrofoam cup, which Tendo has the presence of mind to take from her before she cries "Raleigh!" and throws herself onto the bed.

"You look good," Raleigh murmurs, as she leans down to bury her face in the crook of his neck, hugging him carefully around the IVs.

She laughs into his shoulder, then pulls back and perches on the edge of the bed. "You look horrible."

"Thanks for your honesty." Her hand finds his, her thumb stroking gently over the gauze where the IV went in, and the cool, soft touch sends a shiver up Raleigh's arm, waking memory with sensation. "I slept through the hangover," he says, suddenly realizing. The thought of Mako going through the Drift hangover alone makes him wince, which makes every muscle in his body complain; her hand tightens over his in alarm. His smile turns apologetic. "That can't have been fun for you."

She's smiling and he can see the glint of tears in her eyes, but her voice is steady. "Somehow I managed."

"Yeah." Silence wells up between them, restful and deep. Tendo is gone; Raleigh has no idea when he left. Mako nudges him to get him to move over, and he gives her as much room as he can. She swings her legs up onto the bed and settles next to him, leaning more on the guard rail than on his chest, which is covered in bandaged circuitry burns; but it's enough, the nearness, the solidity of her elbow in his ribs and her hip pressing against his. It's real. And there's a future -- with her in it, more of one than he'd ever thought possible.

The thought makes him close his eyes, trying to see it in the darkness inside his head. A future. "What'll we do now?"

"I don't know," Mako says softly, running her fingers through his hair.

Raleigh leans into the touch and everything else falls away. "Sounds good to me."


End file.
